While chewing on my golden spoon as Marlon likes to put it I decided I would take some time out of my busy schedule to polish my diamond teeth and grind the inaccuracy in Marlon’s post regarding myself.

While I previously was in a 3-man team with the resignation I spoke about in my previous post, it’s currently a 2-man team. There is however a new person starting at the beginning of December, but it will be many months before he learns the systems and can take over some of the heavy lifting. Even I, who has been in the team since February, get passed over for a much of the critical work. Put simply my age and lack of experience is working against me, people don’t trust that I’ll do an adequate job on such a sensitive system; honestly I can’t blame them, and I’ll explain why.

My core functionality involves managing and maintaining our primary ERP system, the infrastructure it runs on and all related EDI links and systems. The major technologies this includes are: MFGPro, Wise and Progress OpenEdge based primarily on RHEL. There are a ton of other things that interact with these systems and all their data in both directions: BizTalk, QXtend, MSSQL, Cognos, Powerplay, a plethora of home grown code, etc.. I support all of that from an admin perspective. Supporting all of this is a pretty large responsibility, as for each hour of unplanned downtime literally equates to hundreds of thousands of Rands in lost revenue. Unplanned downtime is unfortunately all-too-frequent; copper lines gets stolen, UPS’ blow up, switches and servers fail, and of course people make mistakes.

Our main ERP system has something like 600 users working on it, so the most obvious cost when there is unplanned downtime is lost time for both salaried and especially shift workers. We have a few distribution sites, that involves loading trucks with products and sending them out to stores for deliveries. In the case that the systems are down, we could have something like 40 trucks just standing still, not getting loaded, and just idling. For shift workers, if it takes a normal 8 hour shift to load these trucks and you have 4 hours of downtime, you now have to keep those workers on standby doing nothing for 4 hours and pay them an extra 4 to finish loading the trucks. Then you have to organise transport since they’ve now done a 12 hour shift and missed their normal transport. So there’s a nice knock-on effect.

Thus concludes a rather lengthy description of my core functionality. Of course I’m also a Sharepoint admin and a DBA (MSSQL/OpenEdge) as well as an admin of many other smaller applications. I’m currently in the process of doing a massive migration project for MSSQL as a rather problematic and dirty environment has built up over the years; merely a case of “ignore the screaming baby”. We have 31 SQL servers at our main site because apparently it’s a good idea to deploy a new server for every application. So now I have the joyous responsibility of migrating them all to 2 shiny powerful servers.

With only 2 people currently supporting all of this as well as all the projects we have to deal with (DR, system upgrades, migration, etc.), things can get rather tense. Check the financial news, Tiger Brands wants to buy the company I work for, that should give some indication of the size.

So, when people ask me what I actually do I prefer to tell them I make sure other people can do their job. It’s simpler and easier. Most people give me a blank look and start drooling when the acronym ERP comes out of my mouth.